My Name Is Mathilda
by Assassin For Hire
Summary: A literary interpretation of the entire film, told through Mathilda's sole perspective. Vignette overtones, strong language warning.


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**MY NAME IS MATHILDA  
A fictional accompaniment to  
Luc Besson's film _Leon_.**

**by Krista C. (kabanas)  
**===============================  
  


**DISCLAIMER: **Columbia Tri-Star and Luc Besson own this film and therefore these characters. This is a literary accompaniment to one of the most tender films in existence, and a personal favorite. Comments can be sent to Bohemian_Kris@yahoo.com.

  
  
  
_"Nothing's the same after you've killed someone.  
Your life is changed forever. Why would you want to  
sleep with your eye open for the rest of your life?"_

  
  
Whenever I tried to tell Leon I loved him, he always spilled his milk. The first time I told him, he wouldn't even believe me. He said I wasn't in love because I was too young to know what love was at twelve years old. But if you ask me, I think the feeling was mutual. If he didn't love me, he wouldn't have taken me in and let me live with him. He wouldn't have taken care of me. He could have left me crying outside his apartment door, begging to be let in, left at the mercy of those deranged cops.

But he didn't.

He opened the door and killed every one of those goddamned sons of bitches who murdered my brother. Maybe not right away, but he had to get to know me first. And he had to find out who he was going to clean.

Norman Stansfield. Dirtbag. He did it all. Stansfield worked for the Drug Enforcement Agency in a position pretty high up. That bastard had his nose so far up in dope, I can't imagine why the DEA never even took notice. Aren't they supposed to be the good guys?

Since I was in the womb, my life has always revolved around drugs. My family was murdered because of a drug problem. I was out shopping for milk. I didn't care much for my family. If someone hadn't done in my fat pig of a father any sooner, I would have probably ended up doing it myself. My mother wasn't even my real mother. Neither was my sister. Both of them hated me, called me lazy all the time. But now they're not here to kick me around anymore. They were trying to lose some weight, anyways. Stupid sister, I bet she never looked better...

_ If you didn't like them, why are you crying?_

_ Because they killed my brother!_

Charlie--what the hell did he do? He was only four-years-old, for shit's sake. A good looking kid, never used to cry or bother no one, always so sweet to me. I thought hard about getting back at the police officers who did him in. You know, I can really curse fate sometimes.

"Leon, what exactly do you do for a living?"

"Cleaner."

"You mean you're a hitman?"

"Yeah..."

"Cool."

Leon was a pro. Leon was fast. Leon was serious. He was an Italian, the best hitman in town--and everyone knows Harlem is the pits. I told him I wanted to be a cleaner like him, so I could get back at Stansfield. I offered to do his laundry, cook for him, clean his apartment, teach him how to read, anything! But when he refused, I thought I would hate him forever. I needed to prove I could do it, that I was capable of murder. So I took his gun and shot out the window. Around five bullets. I didn't give a shit if anybody got hurt; my aim was bad enough. But Leon was pissed, he was speechless and seriously pissed.

Leon said, "Mathilda, don't do that again or I'll break your neck, got me? I don't work like that, it's unprofessional. In this game there are rules." I just nodded my head and said okay. Leon said, "And stop saying 'okay' all the time, okay?!" I said okay. We had to move apartments because I attracted too much attention. Leon hates attention.

One thing I remember best about my days with Leon was him telling me to "make an effort to talk nicer." I was always cussing before I met him. And always smoking. One day, he'd had enough and told me: "Mathilda, stop smoking. That stuff kills you." I could hardly understand him over his thick accent.

Leon slept sitting up on his recliner with a gun in his hand every night. He never slept on a bed, can you imagine? I taught him how to read. He never learned because he came fresh from Italy with no education, still wet behind the ears. Leon was nineteen when he made his first kill, and proud. I beat him to it.

Leon took jobs for no less than five grand a head. _No women, no children_ was his only rule. But that didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. He was the perfect assassin: cool, composed, deadly. When he worked, he went about it without emotion or noise... And with an aim of 350 feet, it was all child's play to him. He stalked his clients like a cheetah hunting its prey.

In the art of the kill, Leon was a pro.

He had everything going for him because he was the best. If he wanted, he could have blown my fucking brains to kingdom come. I don't know why he never did. He hated me. Maybe it was because he needed me to take care of him and the apartment. Or maybe he was just lonely, like I was, and needed someone around.

I've known a lot of strange people in my life. Bums, drunks, potheads, pimps, whores, killers, all the filth in between. There are the hermits--the old man at the end of the hall in my last apartment, the widow on the first floor... There are people who pretend to be normal and dress themselves in good shoes but wear cheap jewelry--Salvador the Mexican store owner, Mrs. Silva, the cat cat lady. But in the thick of all those people, there was Leon. Friendless, womanless, lonely Leon. His free time revolved around drinking milk, which he consumed in gallons. The only thing that made him happy was a plant, for Christ's sakes. He watered it every day and pruned it to perfection. It was his best friend. 

"Plants are always happy, never questioning, the perfect friend," Leon pointed out. "They don't have roots, like me."

I told him, "If you really love it, you should take it out to a park and plant it so it can have roots."

Each morning, before leaving the apartment to clean, he would set it down on a windowsill so it could get some sun. Even though Leon was never around, it was the healthiest plant in all of Harlem, I swear to God.

Leon worked for Old Tony down in Little Italy, which is like what Chinatown is to the Chinks. Tony runs the Supreme Macaroni restaurant, over in the north end of town. I'm pretty sure he was in the Mafia--Tony has roots going back to some very powerful dons of the past. He took Leon to America and taught him everything about the game. Tony must have had a lot of money, cause he always had someone for Leon to clean. Anyway, he may have paid Leon to do his dirty jobs, but I would have killed the bastards who shot down my family for free. Of course, I couldn't do that without learning the game first, and to know the game, you gotta know the theory.

Eventually, I got Leon to help me out. I'm a great actress. I can fool anybody looking out for my best interests. Once, I even got our craggy, old landlord, Mr. Rind, into thinking that Leon was my lover. It took him forever to realize I was just bull-shitting him. "You're a rotten kid," he once told me. What's it to him?

Leon, on the other hand, was more difficult to be convinced of anything.

"What do you say, Leon?"

"Mathilda, don't take it personally but you're just a little girl. I don't think you could do it," he said.

"What do you want me to do, hmm?" I put on my sweetest face. I was even crying. "I ain't got no place else to go. I'll work my butt off, I promise."

"Mathilda--"

"Why are you so mean to me? You're out there killing people you don't give a shit about...but you won't get the bastards who killed my brother? Leon, I need this. I need time to get my head together."

Leon played with his nails.

"Yeah, and I need..." He sighed. I slid him a glass of milk. "A drink."

We began with target practice. You know, the basics. Dress down. Never wear clothes brighter than the floor. Never uncap the scope until the last minute--it reflects light and they'll see you from a mile away. Stop peepholes on doors with chewing gum. Clean your gun chambers at least once a week. Use silencers for all jobs. Lastly, when all else fails: know the ring trick.

Leon taught me that the better you get at being a cleaner, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last weapon you learn. You won't believe how many people Leon's gutted with a blade.

My first job was some fat honcho exercising in the park. The guy had a dozen bodyguards running behind him, but he was easy to spot from my position on the roof. The tugger was wearing a yellow-and-orange jumpsuit. Government official, celebrity, the Monopoly Man...for that afternoon, he was "Ugly." Ugly stuck out like a fish in the middle of a shark tank. I held my breath and pulled the triggered. Bodyguards swam his crumpled body. Leon pulled me away before the confusion over the paintball bullets got cold.

For weeks, he trained me to be the best and I waited quietly for the day I knew would inevitably fall upon me. I was ready for it--ready for Stansfield--but I never in my wildest dreams expected things to crumble apart so soon. After the police raid, I never heard from my Italian cleaner again.

This was some days after. I was out buying milk for Leon, not suspecting a thing the moment I stepped out of the elevator. When I entered the hallway, five different pairs of hands reached out and dragged me into the shadows. The rest was like a blur. I didn't even know I had stepped into a trap. They were Stansfield's men: DEA officers undercover. They told me that if I didn't cooperate, some very bad things would happen. So I cooperated. I'm not an idiot.

I told them that Leon was alone in his apartment, that he was expecting me. I even gave them keys to the room. But when those dumb cops asked if there was a code to get in, a way of knocking so that Leon would know it was me, I put on an act and gave them the wrong code. Six knocks on the door, instead of four. I figured if worse came to worst, Leon would know something was wrong and he'd prepare.

The police broke into our apartment and Leon blew their heads off. One by one, he cleaned them out faster than I could count. I was screaming. Smoke was everywhere. Bodies littered the doorway. Someone else's blood was splattered on my face. I was held in the hallway and couldn't see a thing. The noise went dead for a bit. Then, from my end of the hallway, I heard the sickening sound of a bullet piercing through a shoulder and shattering bone. It sounded like a carrot had snapped in two. I heard Leon yelping in pain.

My heart felt like it was going to leap out of my chest that instant. I was getting dizzier by the second. Whoever held me against the wall had been a strong bastard. But just as I was about to lose consciousness, Leon came out of nowhere and put a hole through the guy's skull. He cleaned out every single officer who took me hostage.

Outside, I could hear squad cars pulling up to the curb. A lot of men in black uniforms and gas masks poured into the building. There was smoke and panic. Sirens were screaming outside. The whole building was evacuated. Stansfield was there, of course. I knew he'd come to get me if I hadn't acted sooner.

Norman Stansfield, in his ugly haircut, thick beard, cream-colored suit an looking like he was high on something, came for another stab at things. He was a dangerous cop, dangerous because he crossed the line and used the law to gain an advantage, to get away with things like killing someone's four-year-old brother. This guy was relentless, psychotic. He was everything I hated about grown-ups.

Leon took me inside his apartment, a serious look on his face. A bullet had grazed him on the shoulder. The yell. He may have been a pro, but he'd never dealt with so many clients before. For the first time in his life, Leon was unprepared for a kill. It wasn't until I was out of the hallway that I began to worry. I mean, how the fuck were we going to pull ourselves out of that mess? We were trapped in a room on a building four flights off the ground. Not exactly a picnic, right?

But he never gave up on me. He remained calm and emotionless as ever. Then again, people buckle under pressure. When he took an ax and started chopping down a hole in the kitchen wall, I thought he was going insane. Insane, that is, until I realized Leon was only trying to get me the hell out of there. He was making an escape hatch through so I could climb down the wooden beams, slide down the vents in the mortar and crawl my way into freedom.

"Don't worry, Mathilda," he smiled nervously, "we're checking out."

He wrapped his precious plant in a blanket and sent it dropping down the makeshift chute. From the sound of things, it was a hell of a drop down those four flights of the Hotel National. While we were preparing to break out, the police were breaking in. They poured into our floor in droves. Snipers assembled in the hallway. Machine guns were set outside our door. Portable missiles were being called in for the job. I peered into the wall and was smothered in darkness. I realized it was the wrong time to be afraid, but deep down I was scared the fuck right out of my mind. What was going to happen to us?

Before I could dwell on the question, I was being carried into the kitchen wall. I struggled to go down but the passage was so small. It was barely big enough for me, would there be any room for Leon?

That's when I realized Leon wasn't coming with me at all. He was planning on staying there to take care of business. It was an alarming thought. Staying there meant sure suicide.

_Is he insane? He wouldn't._

As though he read my mind, Leon blocked the entrance of the hole and urged me to descend. My mind was a million miles away, I wasn't there. It wasn't my small hands that clung tightly around his neck. I became frantic at the prospect of losing my one friend in the world. But Leon only shook his head and yelled at me, gripped my neck so I would listen.

_Goddamn you, Leon! Are you fucking crazy?!_

I fought to get out of there, I tried to push him away, to find another way out of the situation, to avoid his proposal of leaving me for good. I was delirious--I refused to go down without him. He held me down. I screamed and kept repeating, "I won't go, I won't go..." I broke into tears and sagged deeper into the narrow cavity.

Leon, the calm, rational one, the adult, began rambling himself.

"Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me!"

I quieted down.

"We have no chance together but if I'm alone I can do it. Trust me, I'm in good shape, Mathilda, in good shape. I've worked out a lot of money with Tony, a lot. We'll take it and leave together. Just the two of us, okay?"

I knew he was only saying those things so I wouldn't worry.

"No! I'm not leaving you here! Leon..."

He promised to meet me at Tony's in an hour.

"Now, go!"

Leon gripped my shoulder and pushed me down. Before I could stop myself, I began to cry again. I didn't want to lose him.

"You won't lose me, Mathilda," he swore, "you've given me a taste for life. I want to be happy, sleep in a bed, have roots."

He was reassuring me again, even though somehow I knew I would never see him again. I looked at Leon for a moment and he forced a smile to hide the sadness in his eyes. There was something about them that already seemed empty, dead. Leon never looked older to me than he did in that instant. He cleaned my grubby face with his sleeve.

"Thank you, Mathilda."

"I love you, Leon."

This time he did believe me. I hugged him tight and plunged down into the darkness. Seconds later, as I made my way down the tunnel, a deafening explosion shot through Leon's apartment. A missile. Leon's heroic scream. That was the last I heard from him. When I hit bottom, I grabbed Leon's plant and fled into the safety of the streets.

  
  
  


**EPILOGUE**

Why is it, when you're hurting the most, people always know the one thing to say that'll get you to cry?

I went to Tony's that day and he told me what happened at Hotel National: the entire building caved in during the explosion. Leon escaped but ran into Stansfield. Stansfield put five bullets in Leon's chest. Leon pulled out a grenade and gave Stansfield a proper send-off with the ring trick. Everyone was lost in the blaze. Those bastards got what they deserved...for my brother. For Leon.

Tony mentioned that Leon had saved a lot of money from cleaning. He promised Leon that if anything happened, all of the money would be mine. It was what Leon wanted. For now, this guy Tony was going to keep my money, "Like a bank," he said, until I was old enough to take care of it myself.

"Just like a bank but without the paperwork, no hassles. No one rips off Old Tony."

I felt dirty and exhausted. I didn't hear a word he said. All I wanted to do was stare at the glass of milk on the table, wanting to drown.

"Here's a hundred," Tony plucked a bill from the wad of cash and slid it my way.

"Go buy yourself something nice."

"Can't I get a job instead?" I asked. He laughed at me.

"A job. What the hell can you do?"

"I can clean."

Tony looked at me with a coldness that made my skin crawl. I hinged my jaw tightly. He learned forward and my lips trembled because I was sobbing.

"Get it through your goddamned head! The game's over! Leon's _dead!_" Tony yelled.

Tears were welling in my eyes. I wanted to smash his face in. How could he talk that way about Leon? I knew all too well what happened...

"Look, kid, don't you think I ain't hurtin', too?" he sighed. Then his voice took on a firmer tone. "But he's dead. And you're gonna get your little butt back to school, capiche? Now get outta here 'cause I have a feeling I'm losing my monthly streak of kindness."

The next day I took the bus and went back to school. I found my way to the Spencer School for Girls at the other end of town where, just a month earlier, I'd quit because education meant nothing to me. I didn't get along with the other girls. I wanted to be with my brother. I guess the only reason I went was because there was nowhere else to go. I didn't want to end up alone again. It was easy getting the head counselor to look out for my best interests. Starting all over again wasn't.

Outside the counselor's office is a well-kept lawn that made me remember something. The grass is green there. There's plenty of sunlight. A garden grows just outside Ms. Richard's window. It's on that patch of grass, near some tall trees, that a houseplant grows. It's kept alive and is nurtured to this day by a once grateful girl--now turned young woman.

"I think we'll be okay here, Leon."  
  
  



End file.
